Given the widespread availability and usage of the internet by consumers, many businesses have become interested in being able to effectively implement marketing solutions that can target consumers over the internet. To accomplish this, many marketers are now using marketing automation tools to target prospects, execute marketing campaigns, send leads to sales in real time, and to convert marketing leads into actual sales. An exemplary example of a commercially available marketing automation product is the Eloqua product, available from Oracle Corporation of Redwood Shores, Calif.
The marketing automation tool can be configured to perform many types of marketing functions, such as targeting, engagement, conversion, and analytics. The marketing automation tool can perform targeting, for example, by capturing data about prospects from online interactions and/or online behavior from website visits, downloads, social networks, and searches. This allows profiles to be constructed to more accurately provide content alignment in the marketing materials. Engagement can be implemented, for example, by using the marketing automation system to efficiently create campaigns, mapping a prospect's online behavior to display ad versions to individually target and personalize to the recipient, and by curating content from the prospect's trusted networks, and to tie social activities to leads, pipeline, and even revenue. Conversions can be facilitated by using the marketing automation system to implement better sales alignment, by aligning marketing and sales processes to boost revenue performance using profiles, content, and engagement. In addition, sales can be enabled by using pre-populated templates with consistent branded content that can be used to nurture and close deals. The marketing automation tool can also be used to provide analytics for the marketing activities, e.g., by using dashboards and closed-loop reporting tools. Marketing ROI (return on investment) can be obtained, for example, by measuring marketing return on investment and report on performance from major initiatives to individual campaigns. Benchmarking can also be performed, by measuring against other marketers.
An efficient way to implement such marketing automation solutions is by providing a cloud and/or SAAS (software as a service) approach, where a hosted system is provided to customers (e.g., marketers) to perform the marketing automation tasks. This is a software delivery model where software and its associated data are hosted using a cloud-based infrastructure. One of the biggest advantages for a company to use a cloud/SaaS-based approach is the great potential to reduce IT support costs by outsourcing hardware and software maintenance and support to the cloud/SaaS provider. Another key advantage is that the cloud/SaaS provider often has concentrated expertise in the product being delivered, allowing the company access to higher performing products and greater feature sets, while often usually paying less in overall costs.
The problem faced by the cloud/SaaS provider is that the computing resources are potentially being shared by multiple customers, and there is a need to ensure that each customer is allocated its fair share of the resources.
For example, consider when multiple customers seek to use the marketing automation tool to implement email marketing campaigns. In this scenario, each customer is implementing a marketing campaign that involves creation and distribution of a potentially very large number of emails to its marketing targets/prospects. The complication is that each of the multiple customers may have differing levels and fluctuations of usage needs for the computing resources, the customers may have different levels of contractual service guarantees that must be provided, and the usage needs may not be very predictable. Under these circumstances, it is often very difficult using conventional tools to ensure that each customer is given a fair share of the resources.
Embodiments of the present invention provide a system, method, and computer program product for implementing a marketing automation tool that provides an advanced fairness scheme for resources, where the order that work items are deployed is carefully managed to ensure that customers are treated fairly. The present invention prevents and/or minimizes any customer from being adversely affected by other customers. Additionally, the present approach avoids freezing the sequence of all known items at any point in time.
Other additional objects, features, and advantages of the invention are described in the detailed description, figures, and claims.